


Promises

by Tadpole4176



Series: Retirement Trouble [3]
Category: Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Kidfic, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27191056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tadpole4176/pseuds/Tadpole4176
Summary: What if Top Gear just kept going… until someone thought he needed to retire? And what if Stig thought that was a bad idea?When Jeremy, James and Richard move in together, as promised. James tries not to be annoyed by all the disorganisation.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson/Richard Hammond/James May
Series: Retirement Trouble [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953919
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	Promises

The moving van had pulled up outside their new home, an out of the way place for just the three of them, away from the flat in London and away from work. It had taken some serious negotiations, and compromises on everyone’s part, but for now this was what they needed – a space where Richard could be himself despite looking as though he was ten, and where Jeremy and James could keep an eye out for him whilst pretending that they were just cocking about like normal. James, in particular, harboured a few worries that they would drive him completely mental, but it was the right thing to do, and seeing Richard’s excitement the night before had been more than enough to calm his worries. They were all starting a new chapter in their lives anyway, what better way for all of them to find their feet.

By the time James reached the back of the van, Richard had already leapt into the van, grabbed a box at random, and scrambled out again. He staggered as he attempted to lift it, a box that was full of James’s prized record collection, then James could resist no longer and he found himself abruptly relieved of the burden.

“Richard,” began James, giving him the look.

Richard blinked, attempting to look as innocent as possible.

“Don’t give me that look, I’m immune to that look.” James’s eyes narrowed.

Richard’s shoulders slumped as he conceded.

“You’re just lifting small stuff, Richard,” added James, gently. “Also not breaking my records, no matter how much you dislike them.”

His friend smirked slightly, the beginnings of the usual irrepressible grin starting to emerge.

“And hands off my stuff, it’s in order!” James mock glared at him. “Here, have a pile of Jezza’s records instead.”

“Not worried about me breaking them then?”

“I’m thinking the threat of you breaking them will get Jez off his arse,” responded James.

Richard’s grin finally broke free properly, the slight to his stature forgotten. “Where is he?”

James inclined his head towards the front of the removal van, rolling his eyes. “He’s complaining about the miserable motor in this van, though he called it directing when I asked.”

“Ahh…” Richard was practically bouncing on his feet again. “I’ve got this one.” He stepped out of the shadow of the back of the van, making sure that his box was clearly visible to Jeremy. “James?” he yelled, loudly enough to make James jump, despite knowing what was going to happen. “I’ve got a box of Jez’s records, where am I meant to put it?”

“Can you hold it OK, Hamster?”

“It’s a bit heavy!” Richard yelled back, the smirk hidden from Jeremy’s view by the box.

It didn’t take long. By the time James had reached the front door with his box, Jeremy had caught up with Richard and snatched the box from his hands with a, “Let me help you with that!”

“Hey!” objected Richard. “I was carrying that.”

“With these?” Jeremy balanced the box under one arm so that he could grab Richard’s skinny arm. “They’re like noodles.”

Richard, his eyebrow raised in the customary manner on his newly youthful face, regarded Jeremy sceptically. “Maybe I should direct then, if you don’t trust me to carry anything.”

“I do trust you,” protested Jeremy. “Just not with my records and arms that have turned into noodles. You’re a really tiny person now.”

“You said that all the time before Stig shrank me,” pointed out Richard, pouting but quite enjoying tormenting Jeremy.

“But now I really mean it,” said Jeremy, matter of factly.

Richard sighed dramatically, heavily enough that Jeremy paused to put his arm round him for a moment looking guilty, before normality took hold and he used Richard’s head to balance the records on.

“You’re just winding me up, aren’t you Hamster?” realised Jeremy. “But you’re still not carrying my records, I’ve heard what you think about my records.”

“Pillock,” said Richard, laughing now. “What am I allowed to carry then?”

“Something of James’s,” suggested Jeremy, nudging Richard back to the van.

……………………………………………….

As the van drove away, James gazed after it. He was in the lounge, completely surrounded by unlabelled boxes that certainly belonged to one or both of the others, and he knew this was how his life was going to be. He was going to be constantly bombarded by the mess the others left behind them.

“What have I got myself into?” he asked himself, quietly verbalising his internal thoughts. They were going to drive him mad.

But then he knew he didn’t really mean it. As he surveyed the appalling mess, Richard sidled up to him, coming to stand next to him, his head level with James’s chest then suddenly resting on it.

“Thanks, James,” he whispered, as though the thought shouldn’t be spoken too loudly. “I know losing your space is a big sacrifice.”

James squeezed Richard’s shoulders. “It’s not, not really, it’s right. And it feels right, just a little bit, umm, unpredictable.” He paused for a moment, looking down at his friend. “It’ll be great, as long as you stay out of my room.”

Richard backed up a bit, laughing. “Of course! I don’t want to die a slow and horrible death. Plus there are loads of other good ways to torment you.”

“I’m doomed,” muttered James, smiling back nonetheless. “I’m going to go and sort out my stuff,” he said. “You should move any of this that’s yours.” With that, James departed.

Richard gazed at the mess, well aware that he should really sort it out. Granted, some of it belonged to Jeremy, but some of it didn’t. He wandered over to the first box, peering inside to see what it contained. James, naturally, had carefully labelled and alphabetised his boxes, and stacked them in the correct location in his room. He had then expressed his suggestion that the others do the same and left them to their own devices as they ignored him. So, naturally, the first box contained books that he didn’t recognise and was so heavy he couldn’t move it at all. He moved on to the second, in a different pile, a box full of scalextric parts.

Hmm, scalextric parts. Now a mostly empty house with no furniture to speak of would be the perfect place for a really great scalextric track.

Richard pulled the box over to the lonely beanbag sat in the middle of the floor, and started to rummage through it.

…………………………………………………

Up in his new room, Jeremy was setting up his record player, carefully arranging it on his biggest box, which he suspected contained the remnants of the stand, but he couldn’t really be bothered to build just now. Once he’d got some properly loud music playing, then he’d be able to do some unpacking. He lent behind the music centre, reaching to plug the speaker wires in, swearing loudly every time the wires got tangled around something and probably annoying James quite a lot.

He liked annoying James. Not excessively, just enough, it was fun.

He swore again, stepping back from the music centre to more fully untangle a section of wire that seemed to be partially trapped under his box of records. Naturally, he pulled too hard and the box wobbled heavily, threatening to dump his entire record collection across the floor, before the speaker cable abruptly gave way. Jeremy sighed, he needed James, there was no way he’d be finding his tools in the midst of unpacking.

Jeremy left the room, striding past Richard’s unoccupied room and reaching James’s room. James stood attentively at his, already organised, bookcase, carefully dusting the shelves and pushing all the books properly back against the wall. His room was tidy already, nothing that really screamed out of place, though there were stacks of boxes visible. Probably by James’s standards it was incredibly untidy, but Jeremy had lives for years in places where he hadn’t ever quite bothered unpacking, and the boxes were always less organised than that.

“James?”

“What?” asked James. Not the friendliest of greetings, but then he had said he wanted the room to be his sanctuary.

“It’s OK, I’m not crossing the threshold,” said Jeremy. “Can I borrow some wire strippers?”

James snorted, eyeing Jeremy then moving over to the third stack of boxes, removing the top box in order to open the second one down and quickly handing over the requested tool. “I’d quite like to get this back when you’re done,” he added, looking Jeremy right in the eye in that stern, piercing way he was so good at.

“Of course.” Jeremy pulled his best begging expression, admittedly nowhere near as effective, but worth a go.

James’s eyebrow raised in a manner that demonstrated his complete lack of faith, but he didn’t say anything else about it, turning back to his cleaning instead, and simply adding. “I think we should do spaghetti for dinner.”

Jeremy nodded, pointlessly because James wasn’t looking at him, wondering if James felt Richard was in need of cheering up somehow. Usually feeding Richard with something he actually liked – at least without engaging in an argument first - was a sign they were worried about him. Was James worried about Richard? Had something happened that he’d missed? Which reminded him, where had Richard gone?

Instead of going back to his room, Jeremy pocketed the wire strippers and headed down the stairs, looking for Richard. The large main room downstairs was scattered with a multitude of boxes and no furniture because they hadn’t been able to agree on any one of their existing pieces of furniture to bring. The plan was that in the next few days they’d head out to a shop somewhere and buy something new that they all liked. Still, in all that space with all those boxes, there was plenty of opportunity for a little guy to hide.

“Hamster?” called Jeremy, half expecting an excited face to leap up from behind a pile of boxes. When that didn’t happen, he called again. “Hamster?” Now more afraid that the move had somehow made him feel worse about the whole shrinking thing and he was upset and hiding behind the handy obstacles. If that last week had been anything to go by, Richard was doing fine provided he wasn’t directly confronted by something he ought to be able to do but couldn’t, but moving house and not being able to lift much might well have qualified.

Jeremy was sort of jealous, that sounded like the perfect excuse to avoid manual labour.

Plus what could Hamster really have lifted in the first place? He was tiny even before Stig got involved. Still, Jeremy suspected Richard wouldn’t see it that way. Obviously, it had made a difference, after all, they’d moved in together because of it.

He walked into the boxes, peering round them, surprised his hyperactive friend could manage to be so quiet, whatever state he was in. Then he found him.

Behind a batch of boxes, and surrounded by an impressive pile of scalextric, Richard lay partially sprawled on the beanbag, fast asleep, snoring softly. Jeremy smiled, relieved more than anything that Richard wasn’t sitting alone and miserable in a corner somewhere. He bent down to kneel beside his friend, revelling in the lack of pain his back and knees gave him as he did so. He reached out to brush Richard’s his hair out of his face.

“Richard?” he said, gently.

A sleepy brown eye peered at him in confusion.

“You fell asleep,” said Jeremy.

Richard blushed, rubbing at his eyes and forcing himself to sit up immediately, even though his uncoordinated limbs clearly thought he should still be asleep. “Sorry,” he croaked. “Tired. Your record collection’s surprisingly heavy.”

“You?” For a moment Jeremy was ready to explode, then he caught the twinkle in Richard’s eye, even half asleep. “Come on, Hamster, I’ll help you get some of your boxes upstairs.” He looked down at the mess of scalextric on the floor. “We can build this when there aren’t as many boxes on the floor, just leave a few to irritate James. I think at the moment there are enough to irritate me.”

Richard grinned, allowing Jeremy to pull him to his feet, then pretending to help his older friend up even though he knew he was having no effect at all.

Jeremy patted him on the shoulder. “Which boxes are yours?”

Richard shrugged. “They’re all either yours or mine, maybe we should just take them upstairs and work it out on the way?”

“That should annoy James,” observed Jeremy, reaching for a box and testing the weight before handing it to Richard and taking another himself. “Come on then. If we only annoy James a little bit, I think he’ll make us both spaghetti.”

…………………………………………………………

Stig opened the door slowly, looking round the door of his friends’ new house cautiously, wondering why they hadn’t answered the bell. The door swung open easily, so he stepped inside, pushing it closed behind him, keeping his bottle of Castrol GTX safely tucked in the crook of his arm. He walked almost silently through the entrance way and into the main room, which occupied the majority of the downstairs living space.

The room was still full of boxes, and initially Stig thought it was only boxes, but as he began to move a few boxes upstairs, he revealed his three friends. The three of them were surrounded by cushions and scalextric pieces with no obvious reason to where they were placed. James and Jeremy were both slouched against the wall, heads back and snoring slightly. Richard, lay on the cushions between them, a piece of track still in his hand, his head resting on Jeremy’s long thigh, and his feet pressed against James’s legs, each of them reaching a hand out to rest on him in their sleep.

On finding them, Stig regarded them intently for a few moments, then with a sharp, approving nod, he placed his bottle of Castrol GTX carefully on the kitchen table and went back to shifting the remaining boxes onto the upstairs landing, two or three at a time. With that done to his satisfaction, he came back and prised the track from Richard’s hands, causing him to stir briefly.

Stig had plans. He knelt down on the floor and started to build the scalextric track, dismantling some of the half thought out creations that were already completed and arranging it to his liking. A long slow curve here, a tight bend there, and a couple of crossovers where opponents could be removed from the track. Stig moved to plug the track in and carefully placed a car on the track. He’d need to get some practice in to be assured of victory, after all, and his friends were bound to wake up soon.


End file.
